6 FILMMAKING TIPS FROM MICHAEL HANEKE

Earlier in the year, Michele Hanekebecame the 7th director in history to win more than one Palme d’Or at Cannes. The record for most Palme d’Or wins is now a seven-way tie.

The writer/director’s work is often enigmatic or experimental, but he’s also crafted stories that plumb the dramatic depths of loving relationships and extensively explored the beauty of music. From The Seventh Continentto Love, he’s made us question our role as viewers, challenged concepts of freedom and security, and did it all by making entertaining films. Some of which involve pig slaughter.

So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from the man who turned Jean-Luc Godard’s most famous quote upside down.

Funny and Horrifying Can Be The Same Thing

“There are many scenes [in The Piano Teacher] that are both terrible and horrifying for the spectator and funny at the same time. There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition – which means seeing things you’re familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there’s also hysterical laughter – a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us. This is also the case in our everyday lives: we turn to laughter as an escape valve.”

Mess With Your Audience Visually

“We’re used, from TV, to scenes giving immediate information, so that the viewer thinks ‘I’ve seen it. I understand it. Next,’ and you never really get to the point of having a particular sensitivity to the situation. . . If you want to move someone, then you have to play with their visual habits, with what they’re used to seeing.”

Breaking the fourth wall is nothing new, but the moment in Funny Gameswhen Paul (Arno Frisch) looks over his shoulder and winks right into the camera is terribly unsettling, not just because of what’s happening to one of the characters, but because of how brazenly Haneke is acknowledging the audience’s presence. It’s something we’re not used to.

That’s one example of many, and there are a lot of different ways to shake convention, but the key is not to deliver the same rhythms we’re used to. Don’t be afraid to shake the audience up.

Draw Scenes From Your Slaughter-Filled, Sheltered Childhood

You Need an Audience, But Not at the Cost of Your Principles

“If a director says he doesn’t care how many people see his films at all, I simply don’t believe him. Otherwise why would he bother to make the film? The only explanation would be that it would be an act of masturbation. I think that every creator is looking for a receptor. He’s looking for an audience. There are two parts of the equation: a creator and, necessarily, the receiver of the work. It’s the same thing for a painter who wants his paintings to be seen. However, if you betray your principles in the hopes of reaching a wider audience, then that’s as fatal as betraying your belief. Even the most elitist director or author who claims that he doesn’t care if his works are seen or not, then I have to think that he’s either a liar or a hypocrite. ”

Creation is the first step in a two-step process. Getting eyes and ears on your work is the fulfillment of why it was created – and it’s easy to see why a provocateur like Haneke believes this – but there’s a balance. It feels incredible to see a huge audience experience what you’ve made, but if you’ve gained a larger audience by sacrificing your ideals, you’re not really showing them your work after all. Definitely an interesting concept.

In the same interview, Haneke claims that books and movies are boring if they don’t leave the viewer or reader with questions to wrestle with. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his answers in interviews seem to achieve just that.

Every Film Rapes the Viewer

“I believe that the purpose of drama is not to let you go home feeling reassured. That was never its purpose, even as far back as the Greek tragedies. Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer? I try to rape him into being reflective, and into being intellectually independent and seeing his role in the game of manipulation. I believe in his intelligence. At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.”

Michael Haneke will grab you by the ears, and you will know something.

By now, his attitude toward the audience is obvious, but it raises a great question about how safely you’re playing it as a storyteller. When this interviewer asks about Haneke’s pride in seeing people walk out of his movies, he talks briefly about the dichotomy of viewers. The oversimplified breakdown is between those who want to be slapped and have their perceptions challenged, and those that see movies strictly to have their views and ideas reinforced. Are you afraid of people leaving the theater, or do you relish the idea of thinning the herd to those who accept the challenge you might give them?

Michael Haneke is a crazy person.

But he’s a hell of a wonderful, creative, crazy person. Stubborn and confrontational, he has a lot to teach filmmakers who want to do something different with form and function and almost nothing to say for those wishing to work exclusively in the mainstream. What’s probably most fascinating is that he’s a living artifact of how safe being dangerous can be. After all of his work, how has he put himself at risk in anyway?

That is to say, it’s often easy to forget that storytelling comes with a safety net because it isn’t reality. People may think Haneke is disturbed, and he may get some mindless interview questions from time to time, but for the most part, he’s built a great filmmaking success on ideas that come off as needing bravery (see tip #6), but at the end of the day, they’re only movies.

So the best lesson of all: It’s safe to jump off the deep end. Why limit yourself in the ideas and themes you want to work on? There’s no reason to fear going out on a limb.

“... Independent production, handmade and filmed with many fights on the side of its creator, December Riots, comes to remind us the life we never lived, the fight we never fought and the reasons we got here, with bowed heads and humiliated lives ... " Chrisostomakis Laktaridis

FRANK CAPRA

"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays lago to your psyche. As with heroin the antidote to film is more film".

JONAS MEKAS

"In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets".

JOSEPH LOSEY

"Film is a dog: the head is commerce, the tail is art. And only rarely the tail wag(-s) the dog".

ABEL GANCE

" It will now be easier to understand why I have come to create Napoleon, because he was a paroxysm in his time, which was a paroxysm in history. General Bonaparte lies at the edge of a maelstrom, a lucid observer, whereas the Emperor lies in the whirlpool, is dragged into it and loses his self-control.

Bonaparte is not dragged off by this current. He watches and observes; he is master of his fate. He can halt it should he wish to. Napoleon cannot. He has neither the time nor the means to do so. He must go where fate leads him; that is his tragedy, the one I shall try to compose with the music of light".

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

"Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film".

STANLEY KUBRICK

"

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job."

GEORGE LUCAS

“You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don't have that kind of feeling for what it is you are doing, you'll stop at the first giant hurdle.”

STEVEN SPIELBERG

“I dream for a living.”

BRIAN DEPALMA

"The real trouble with film school is that the people teaching are so far out of the industry that they don't give the students an idea of what's happening".

JAMES CAMERON

"People have asked me if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future and my answer has been recently that I am pessimistic about systems and optimistic about individuals."

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